In the first control session of the course, the Prime Minister boasted of being “a dog without a collar.” It is an interesting projection. Pedro sees himself as a wild dog, streetwise, untamable: precisely the kind of dog that no man would consider his best friend. Because in our cultural tradition there are two opposing meanings of the canine: one positive and one negative. The first defines Argos, the incorruptible greyhound of the wandering Ulysses who will not die until he is the only one to recognize his master returned in the guise of a beggar. But then we have Diógenes, who founded the school of the cynics (“the dog-like,” in Greek) proudly appropriating the insult that the Athenians directed at him for living on the street and not respecting the city’s laws. To which moral paradigm could we ascribe Pedro if he were indeed a dog, that of cynicism or that of loyalty?
In another time, the marriage formed by Pedro Sánchez and Begoña Gómez would be buried like the old medieval and Renaissance nobles: in an alabaster tomb with a little dog sculpted at their feet. Although in their case, not just any little dog would do. This sculptural convention expressed the conjugal fidelity that had distinguished the deceased in life, but the only bond Pedro has not broken is the one that ties him to his will to power. So at the feet of the alabaster tomb of the Sánchez-Gómez should be a Doberman, for example.
We will remember Sanchism as a fascinating era of voluntary servitude. Of general animalization. And we do not know if when the dog dies (electorally, to be precise) the rage will end; that is, the exhausting frontism that has unhinged Spanish public life throughout the last decade. But this brutalized way of exercising power despite reason will leave as many entertaining sequels as the porcine metamorphosis of the Odyssey. There will be a shortage of Circes to restore the rational condition to so many men and women who accepted to lower themselves to an unprecedented degree of sectarian domestication. Who even in this agonizing phase of the legislature still boast of their submission, of their pack-like impulse, of their chorus of barks.
Sánchez will be a dog without a collar, but when the electorate sacrifices him he will leave many collars orphaned of dogs.